


Residual Memories

by tenshinokorin



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: Gen, Ghost Stories, bishonenink halloween special, no unsolicited concrit please
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 09:25:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2542604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenshinokorin/pseuds/tenshinokorin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Winhill is a place of long memories and cold welcomes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Residual Memories

It was raining in Winhill by the time they got back from the job, an icy, persistent downpour that glazed the streets and windows, turning the fallow flowerbeds to mud. Squall looked over the unwelcoming village street, and zipped up his jacket with an air of resignation. He'd never found Winhill inviting, not even on the sunniest spring day. And those warmer days were long gone now, the trees emaciated black veins against the faded hills, the chimney smoke petulantly trickling above the rooftops. 

Selphie emerged from the inn and jogged up alongside him, her boots scattering puddles left and right. "They're all full," she announced, and even the indomitable flip of her hairdo seemed to wilt. "They've only got three rooms, and apparently two of them are leaking." 

Zell, usually a five-foot-five electric dynamo unfazed by weather of any sort, shivered inside his jacket like a drenched chocobo. "You've gotta be kidding! Call us here to take care of their stupid monster problem, and not even put us up for the night?" 

"That's Winhill for you," Squall said, and shouldered his gunblade. "Come on." 

"Come on where?" Selphie said, hugging herself. "Irvine and Quisty won't be able to bring the Ragnarock in until this rain stops." 

"Well unless you want to sleep out here," Squall said, indicating the narrow strip of slightly-less-drenched gravel hard up against the side of the inn, "We're going to have to find somewhere else."

 _Somewhere else_ turned out to be a narrow two-story house, wedged between the town bar (closed for the night) and a seed wholesaler (closed for the season). The house was unlocked and yet unmolested, furniture all in place, china still in the cabinets, as though the residents got up and left one day and just never came back. The kitchen had yellowed wallpaper that was punctured in a sinister staccato line. The hardwood floor under their feet had dark, grasping stains. It smelled of musty neglect. 

"You have got to be kidding," Selphie said, barely inside the door. 

"It's dry," Squall said, which was not really an encouraging endorsement. Lightning flashed outside, followed half a second later by a deafening thunderclap that made Squall's argument for him. Selphie yelped and jumped inside, slamming the door behind her. 

"No power," Zell said, punching the light switch. "Either it's long cut off or the storm killed it." 

Squall put his gunblade across the table and rummaged in a cabinet. Though the house gave every impression of being abandoned to its own devices, the windows were snugly sealed against the wind, the roof sound, the floor sturdy. There was oil in the reservoir of the lamp Squall found, and its charred wick still smelled of soot. Someone with money and influence and a sentimental streak six miles wide had made sure the place was cared for. Someone who wanted an anonymous place to stay when he came back to visit. Someone who right now was safe and warm in Esthar. 

Squall struck a match and lit the wick of the lantern. Bathed in the golden light, the kitchen became almost cozy. "There's a bedroom on the second floor," Squall said, peeling out of his drenched jacket. "Selphie, you can take the bed. Zell, we'll take the floor. Should be enough blankets to go around. Laguna keeps some things on hand here, see if you can't find us something to eat." 

In the light of the lantern, Selphie's green eyes widened in recognition. "Wait, I know this place! Kiros stayed here with Laguna!" 

"It's Ellone's house," Squall said, and sat down in one of the spindly kitchen chairs. He was drenched to the bone, exhausted. The nest of monsters Winhill had asked them to exterminate turned out to be tougher than planned; Squall's shoulders ached with heaving his gunblade around, his spells were spent. Shiva, hibernating somewhere in his hippocampus, told him she wanted nothing to do with him for the rest of the night, thank you. 

"Found some soup," Zell said, flipping down a few cans (not very dusty) and a saucepan (medium-dusty) from the kitchen shelf. He cleaned the pot with the hem of his shirt, and eyed a damp-looking woodpile by the stairs. "Selphie, how about Ifrit giving us a little fire, here?" 

"Don't burn down the house," Squall said, still flopped backwards in his chair, eyes closed. 

Selphie made a little noise of pique. Ifrit hadn't burned down anything in ages. Nothing important, anyway. In a few minutes there was a fire in the woodstove, the smells of neglect banished by more vibrant odors of lamp oil, smoke, and hot soup. Outside, the storm raged on. 

Upstairs, the bedroom was snug, warm from the stove chimney that ran through one wall. Selphie pulled stacks of blankets out of a wardrobe with one missing door, and they all bundled up in the hopes of finding a few hours' rest. Tomorrow, if the storm continued, they could worry about more advanced comforts. For now they were glad to be full, mostly dry, warm, and (after those hexdragons), still alive. 

Squall, though probably the most tired, was the last to fall asleep. It was stilted and uneasy, and in one of the longer periods of wakefulness he was tempted to give up trying altogether. Selphie was curled up in a ball on the bed, Zell was snoring blissfully in his cocoon of blankets. Squall leaned his head back against the faded wallpaper and listened to the rain thudding down on the roof, in a cadence sharp as gunfire. 

Squall was suddenly tense, every nerve singing. That was _actual_ gunfire. And from downstairs there were voices: a muffled conversation of growls and pleas, punctuated now and then with a ragged sob. It was followed by the heavy thud of a body hitting the floor, the clatter of an overturned chair, a mercenary bark of command, and Squall was on the landing, gunblade in hand. With a soldier's sense for trouble he didn't pause to wonder what was happening, prepared to plunge headfirst into the fray and sort out questions later. Squall heard the sobbing rise and fall in a keening echo of the wind outside, and for the first time a word came to him clearly, spoken by an angry male voice. 

_Witch_. 

Squall had a bullet in the chamber, and he crossed the landing in two strides. But then his boot hit the topmost step, and the sounds ceased with the abrupt totality of a muted radio. Even the storm had quieted. The darkness at the bottom of the stairs was sentient and opaque, and not even a creak of a floorboard or a whisper of breath came from it. 

Squall hesitated, a strange quiver in his belly, a taste of sweat on his lip. The silence drove hard against his eardrums. A minute passed, and perhaps another, as Squall stood with one foot on the stairs, a finger on the trigger, and his pulse a slowing clamor in his veins. Squall wasn't sure how long he waited, only that it was long enough that he was beginning to dismiss it as a dream--a dream brought on by too much work, not enough sleep, and the unsettling potency of those old bullet holes in the kitchen wall. 

His grip eased on the butt of his gunblade, he shook his head in faint exasperation. Laguna must be nuts to stay here. He was going back to bed. He turned to head back to the bedroom, and an ice-cold hand shot out of the darkness and fastened around his ankle. 

_"Help."_

It was some consolation, in retrospect, that horror fully took Squall's voice away. Because otherwise he would have screamed. Some things are too much to experience without screaming, even when you're a SeeD, even when you've saved the world. And the dead woman on the stairs was one of those things. 

Her lower half was lost in the darkness, but that was little mercy. The bullets of Adel's which-hunters had shredded her body, her bloody clothes left wet smears on the steps. But it was not the gore that froze Squall's blood, not the vice-like grip on his boot, not the red froth on the woman's lips. Her eyes were alive in that dead face, alive and desperate as she tried to pull herself further up the stairs. 

_"Ellone,"_ she said, in a voice that came from the walls around Squall as much as from the woman's mouth. _"They took...my daughter. Save... Ellone..."_

Squall wanted to answer, but even at the best of times, words didn't come easily to him. The woman's grip was impossibly strong, and he realized to his horror that she was bringing the darkness with her, and pulling Squall down into it. He could hear the gunfire again from the darkness, the sobbing, as Ellone's dead mother tried to drag Squall into a decades-old tragedy, played over and over again at the bottom of the stairs. He tried to wrench himself free, but her cold fingers had numbed his leg to the knee, and he only succeeded in losing his balance. He fell on the landing, his head collided with the floorboards, and the last thing he knew was the sibilant whisper of cold seeping slowly towards his heart. 

 

Someone was tugging on his boot. No, not tugging, kicking. The way you would to something in the road, when you weren't quite sure it was dead. 

"And there's our noble Garden Commander," Irvine said, from somewhere higher up than usual. "Passed out on the floor like a cadet after graduation night. I've always wanted to make that scar into a big X, anyone got a marker?" 

"Don't you dare," Squall growled, forcing himself upright. "Or I'll give you something permanent." 

Irvine and Quistis were standing on the stairs, Zell and Selphie were in the bedroom doorway. There was no darkness, no ghost. The storm had passed, and out the landing window Squall could see a cerulean sliver of a bright morning sky. Squall's legs were halfway down the stairs, his gunblade nearby. 

"Never knew anyone who liked sleeping on _stairs_ ," Selphie said, folding up blankets to put back in the cabinet. "But hey, as long as you're comfortable!" 

"You okay?" Zell asked, unusually quiet. He had a wary, knowing expression, quite unlike his regular troublemaker grin. But then, Zell was junctioned to Eden. Sometimes he knew things he shouldn't. 

"Fine." Squall got to his feet, and in a disquieting revelation he realized his heel was loose in his right boot, as though something had tried to pull it off. "Let's get the hell out of here." 

He left them to their exchanged glances as he stomped down the stairs, and he deliberately avoided looking at the bullet-pocked wall, the old bloodstains, the smiling faces in the dusty framed photographs. 

He'd never liked Winhill. 

~o~

**Author's Note:**

> Halloween ff8 fic request from notedfatberg! It was actually really hard to come up with something that would be scary for these guys-- they fight monsters and witches and undead things all the time. But sometimes what's most frightening is knowing the tragedy of the past, and knowing you're helpless to change it. Even when you've been through time compression and back.


End file.
